While our team is working hard on finishing up the 5.0 update for Mastodon, I have something else to share with you. This year, instead of launching sales towards the end of November, leaving very little time for shipping before everything closes down for the holidays, we’re opening pre-orders for our latest #Plushtodon models **right now**. Take a look at them! Pre-order nowShipping expected November 2026 By now, you know the drill: They’re made of soft velboa, are ICTI Ethical Toy Program and Intertek WCA certified, and are suitable for children 3 and older. **Here’s the important info** : We expect to be able to start shipping them beginning of November. If you order something else in the same order with them (and you should, to make the most of the shipping cost, and because we make really cool, high quality merch), everything will be shipped together only once the plushies are ready. If that’s not how you want it, order separately. What else is there that you could attach to your order, I hear you ask? Well, as it happens, this year marks the **10th anniversary of Mastodon itself**. That’s right, we’ve been around for 10 years. October 16, 2026 is when I first publicly shared a link to Mastodon on a link aggregator site, bringing in the first wave of users and officially “launching” the project. To celebrate the anniversary, our artist Dopatwo and I prepared a design, screen printed on hoodies and t-shirts (this time, not just unisex t-shirts, but ones made for women as well, as you requested). If you’re not familiar with fabric printing techniques, screen printing is a really cool one, giving a very vibrant and durable result. And of course we only put them on high quality cotton. We also still have lots of “I write alt text” t-shirts, which have one of my favourite Dopatwo artworks on them. As for the small stuff, we’ve got 3 different enamel pin designs available and some cute sticker sheets. Here you can check out people showing off their Mastodon plushies on Mastodon! Anyway, thanks for sticking with us!

RSS feeds are simple, easy-to-use feeds of content from the internet, such as news articles, videos and podcasts. You can use RSS apps to follow Mastodon accounts, and use Mastodon accounts to follow RSS feeds. ## What is RSS? RSS is basically just a special kind of internet address that tells an RSS app where to find content. The apps used to follow RSS feeds are often called “feed readers” or “news readers”. When you enter an RSS address into an RSS app, the posts made by that address are shown in a chronological list. RSS feeds can work for all kinds of content including blogs, news sites, podcasts etc. (Most podcast apps are powered by RSS, even if they don’t publicly state this.) ## How to follow Mastodon accounts from an RSS feed reader app All Mastodon accounts have an RSS address which can be followed from RSS apps: 1. Go to a Mastodon account profile’s original page on a web browser. 2. Copy the web address from the browser’s address bar 3. Add .rss to the end of the web address to create the account’s RSS address 4. Add the account’s RSS address to your RSS app For example, the RSS feed for the FediTips account is https://social.growyourown.services/@FediTips.rss ⧉. Note that the RSS feed of a Mastodon account only shows posts with public visibility, you will not see replies or posts with other visibilities. ## How to follow Mastodon hashtags from an RSS feed reader app The RSS feed of a hashtag on a server can be found by doing the following: 1. Go to the server’s website 2. Search for the hashtag 3. Click the hashtag from the suggestions list 4. Copy the hashtag’s web address and add .rss to the end to get its feed ## How to follow RSS feeds from Mastodon You can also now do this the other way around, and follow RSS feeds from your Mastodon account, thanks to a service called RSS Parrot ⧉: 1. Create a new post but don’t publish it yet 2. Mention the RSS Parrot Fediverse account _@birb@rss-parrot.net_ 3. Mention the RSS address you want to follow 4. Publish the post (it doesn’t have to be a public post, DMs will work as well) 5. RSS Parrot will create a new Fediverse account that mirrors the contents of the RSS address you provided, and then reply to you with a link to the new account 6. Follow this new account to follow the RSS feed This method works for any Fediverse platform that supports microblogging, including Mastodon and many other Fedi platforms. ## How to follow PeerTube Channels and Accounts from RSS apps You can follow any PeerTube accounts or channel through RSS apps: 1. Go to the channel’s or account’s profile page on PeerTube 2. Click the channel’s or account’s _Subscribe_ button (if you are logged in on that PeerTube server, click the little arrow on the right of the subscribe button instead) 3. There will be an RSS subscription option at the bottom of the subscription menu, click this to go to the RSS feed (which may look a bit crazy but don’t worry!) 4. Copy the address at the top of the browser to get the channel’s or account’s RSS address 5. Paste the RSS address into your RSS app This feed will deliver embedded videos to your feed reader and you can watch them there. ## Friendica: Champion of RSS The Fediverse platform Friendica has probably the best RSS support on the Fediverse, including a built-in feed reader which doesn’t need any third party services or apps. To follow an RSS feed in Friendica: 1. Paste the RSS address into the search box in Friendica 2. The RSS feed’s profile page will appear, click Follow 3. The RSS feed’s contents will start showing up in your main timeline as it is published, and will look like normal account posts Friendica also lets you turn RSS feeds into Fediverse accounts that people can follow from other Fediverse platforms. ↩ Back to the front page

Editorial curation by the real humans at Flipboard

We’ve just released two new t-shirts on our shop, based on slogan suggestions from the community, and featuring lovely artwork from our artist Dopatwo. One is “My friends are not for sale”, and the other is “I write ALT text”. We’ve chosen quality over quantity, as we often do, by screen printing the designs on high-quality, organic cotton. As someone who’s bought a lot of band merch over the years, I can tell you - they feel good to the touch. Our merch is not a big money maker for us compared to direct donations (remember, Mastodon is crowdfunded by the community — there’s no venture capital or investors, no ads or monetization), but it is fun and it helps bring awareness to the platform. We also try to create bespoke, high quality items in limited runs. If we can sell these t-shirts it will allow us to make more cool things in the future, from more cool t-shirt designs, to beanies, hoodies, and more. We’ve also restocked on our enamel pins (have you seen how shiny and glittery the “Live, laugh, federate” pin is?), and there’s some leftover stock of various other items as well. Take a look around the store! On a related note, if you’d like to help spread awareness of Mastodon in real life, **we now offerprintable poster designs in multiple languages**. Check it out! ### Join the mailing list Get notified when new merch becomes available for sale Subscribe See our privacy policy

Welcome to the _24th edition_ of Trunk & Tidbits 🎉 We’ve been publishing this monthly series, “behind the scenes of the code” from the Mastodon team, for a whole two years now! We’re getting close to the release of Mastodon 4.6. In the past few weeks we published two feature updates about things you’ll see in the next version: * firstly, there was a post about a redesign for profile pages, now available to try out on `mastodon.social` and coming to other servers with version 4.6; * we also posted a more detailed update on Collections (previously briefly known as “Packs”). Our goal in posting these updates is to offer a community-driven design process, and to provide visibility into _how_ and _why_ we reached implementation choices - similar to the transparency we’ve been offering via Trunk & Tidbits, but at a slightly less technical level. One more thing on a related topic - Imani spoke at FOSS Backstage Design, about the journey of being a designer at Mastodon, and some of the challenges and opportunities of working on federated software at scale. You can watch the talk on YouTube. ## Releases Last month, we released updates for the Mastodon server software across the three active branches. These point releases all include security updates, as well as fixes to compatibility with GoToSocial features. * 4.5.8 * 4.4.15 * 4.3.21 As usual, we strongly encourage server owners to update to the most recent version, in order to get the most stable and secure code and up-to-date user experience. > Note that this is the final month for the 4.3.x branch - the end of support date for this version is May 6th 2026. ## Backend and Web In March 2026 we reviewed and merged 347 Pull Requests (268 with translation and dependency updates removed), from 13 contributors. We’re continuing to focus on the new profile design work, and Collections, both of which will be major features of Mastodon 4.6 - so again this month, much of the work has been around these two areas. Thank you for the feedback shared about the updates to profiles, in particular - this is being used to shape the final full release version. We’ve also worked on improving the accessibility of the Mastodon Web UI. This has involved focusing on the sign-up and login flows, better colour contrast, and improved navigation with skip links, with more to come in the near future. — PR #38006 (by diondiondion) — PR #38188 (by diondiondion) — PR #38036 (by diondiondion) Hidden behind a feature flag for now, we’ve added the ability for account owners to allow anonymous visitors to subscribe to their posts via e-mail, without a Mastodon account. This feature is _not yet ready for testing_ - we are working on the missing pieces right now. The work has been funded by an NGI0 grant through NLNet, to improve Mastodon’s suitability for use by institutions. Mastodon now supports two additional Fediverse Enhancement Proposals, FEP-2c59 (_Discovery of a Webfinger address from an ActivityPub actor_ — PR #38239 (by ClearlyClaire) ) and FEP-3b86 (_Activity Intents_ — PR #38120 (by Gargron) — PR #38130 (by ClearlyClaire) ). This will improve interactions with other Fediverse servers. On the API side, as part of the profile redesign we are introducing a new dedicated `profile` endpoint, allowing client apps to access the current profile and update it. App developers are encouraged to add support for this new set of functions - they also allow brand new capabilities, such as setting a text description for profile pictures and header banners. Lastly, there have been a lot of technical improvements and refactoring in the codebase, including: support for Ruby 4.0; the removal of the `oj` gem for JSON handling in the backend; and, an upgrade of our web client toolchain to Vite 8, which should make the web assets build step both faster and more memory efficient. ## Android We continued working on the profile redesign, and made two releases with minor bug fixes. ## iOS We shipped version 2026.02 with a number of technical improvements that will help us keep moving forward, and some visible fixes as well: * You can now manage multiple logged-in accounts from the Settings screen (this has always been accessible by long-pressing the current account avatar, but was not easy to discover). * Fix for No audio while playing videos or audio before going full screen * Fix for Quoted posts that are _long_ are not truncated * Fix for Encoded HTML entities in display names are applied ## Community One of the benefits of building open platforms is that people can build interfaces that work well for different scenarios. We’ve got a number of client apps listed on our website (and you can add your own, if it is not listed there yet - send a pull request on our website repository). Not everyone uses the latest and greatest devices, and even if you do, maybe you also like small and simple interfaces as well? In these cases, check out smolfedi - a lightweight, cross-fedi-platform front end that works with Mastodon as well as with several other Fediverse services. If you run a Mastodon server, or any kind of Fediverse server - or even if you ran a server, and then closed it down - the Social Web Foundation has a new survey to gather data for a sustainability report. The Fediverse Sustainability Survey is anonymous, and the report will be published on the SWF site in the future. ## Thank you As the initiator and author of twenty four editions of Trunk & Tidbits, and on behalf of the Mastodon team, I’d like to say, directly to _you_ - Thank You, for all of your support over the past couple of years. Please do “chip in” with a recurring donation to the project - Open Source, not-for-profit software and movements like ours, need to be sustained. ### Thank you for supporting Mastodon We develop and maintain the free and open source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this — we rely entirely on your support. Donate to the project View our sponsors